Rethinking Turing and his Test

Much like a religious document, the paper in
which Alan Turing
first described what we know today as the Turing Test has
inspired endless debate over what he really meant. Arguments hinge on
seemingly insignificant choices of words or phrases. Did Turing really
mean "immaterial soul" instead of "immortal soul" when he describes the
theological objections to thinking machines? Did Turing really mean
"think" or the actions that result from thinking? Stevan Harnad has
published a new essay titled, "The Annotation Game: On
Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence" (PDF
format). To a large extent, this paper is concerned with listing all
the unfortunate wording, lack of definitions, and general annoyances
found in
Turing's original paper. There are some interesting
points raised, however, such as noting that a reasonable definition of
"machine" as used by Turing could be "any dynamical, causal,
system", which means both toasters and humans qualify as machines.

Just past theories and a word "thinking",the definition of the word
and religious confusion from a while ago.Recently we seem to be making
advances and seeing quite an extra bit of human/robotic "evolution" in
2006.